Neville Marriner (b1924)

Neville Marriner was initially taught to play the violin by his father and after receiving lessons from Frederic Mountney he entered the Royal College of Music at the age of thirteen. With the advent of World War II and the military enlistment of many orchestral payers, while still a student he soon gained experience of playing in a professional orchestra, for instance with the London Symphony Orchestra and under conductors such as Sir Henry Wood. When he himself was called up he served in the Royal Navy, participating in motorboat raids into France before D-Day. Having been invalided out of the navy with kidney damage, while in hospital he met the keyboard player and musicologist Thurston Dart, with whom he was later to collaborate extensively. Following the end of the war Marriner returned to the Royal College and then went to Paris to complete his studies at the Paris Conservatoire with René Benedetti. After teaching at Eton College for a year (1947–1948) he became a professor at the Royal Academy of Music in 1949; in parallel he became a member of the Martin String Quartet as well as of the Jacobean Ensemble, formed with Thurston Dart and another orchestral player, Peter Gibbs. Driven by Dart’s musicological interests, this group specialised in the music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and made several records for the L’Oiseau-Lyre label.

Marriner joined the Philharmonia Orchestra as a violinist in 1952, and became principal second violin of the London Symphony Orchestra in 1956, remaining in this post until 1968. In 1959, having been asked to arrange a series of concerts to be given in the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, he formed a small ensemble named after the church, most of whose members were principal players in the London orchestras. Inspired by Dart’s theories of performance practice as well as irked by the lack of responsibility and variable playing standards then common in most symphony orchestras, Marriner was keen to achieve a high technical standard early on. As he has commented, ‘I think we got together as the Academy to give ourselves…responsibility and to play well. One thing we were looking for from the start was players who really fitted together, who sounded in tune.’ The result was successful and the group was quickly engaged to record, initially for the Argo label. ‘We immediately recorded all those Italian ice-cream merchants—Manfredini, Corelli, and so on,’ Marriner has recalled. ‘So in one leap we had gone from being a friendly society to something almost professional.’ In the same year he participated in Pierre Monteux’s conducting school in Maine in the USA, and gradually he developed a conducting career alongside his work as a violinist.

So successful did Marriner’s numerous recordings with the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields prove to be that the group was gradually taken up by other labels such as Philips and EMI. Ten years after its formation, in 1969 Marriner was invited to become chief conductor of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, which was made up of young players and freelance musicians from the Hollywood orchestras. His success with this group led to offers to conduct major American orchestras, for instance those in Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis, and San Francisco as well as elsewhere. At the same time in England he served as associate conductor of the Northern Sinfonia from 1971 to 1973, and as artistic director of the South Bank Summer Music Festival in London between 1975 and 1977. Marriner relinquished his post with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in 1978 following his appointments as chief conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra (formerly the Minneapolis Orchestra) in 1978 and as artistic director of the Meadowbrook Festival in Michigan in 1979. In 1979 he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire and in 1985 he received a knighthood. He returned to Europe in 1986 as chief conductor of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, retiring from this position in 1989, and remaining active throughout this period as a recording artist with the Academy. Subsequently he has enjoyed a career as a freelance international conductor, commenting wittily, ‘The awful thing about a conductor becoming geriatric is that you seem to become more desirable, not less. I just wish all these offers had come in when I was thirty!’

Marriner is a most efficient musician whose vast depth of experience is immediately apparent in his ‘no-nonsense’ approach to conducting. In general his performances are characterised by brisk tempi, elegant phrasing, and an insistence upon high technical standards. On the podium he is extremely clear in his gestures, which tend to be economical whilst also expressive. His recorded repertoire with both the Academy and other orchestras is enormous, covering the full gamut of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century repertoires, and moving as far into the twentieth century as the English composers Michael Tippett and Nicholas Maw. He has also had considerable success recording operas and choral works. As to repertoire, Marriner has catholic views, believing that ‘…the modern and avant-garde composers of today will be part of the standard repertoire thirty years from now.’ He also sees a continually developing role for the orchestra which he founded with his wife, Molly, viewing it ‘…as a regenerative institution. I would like new people with new ideas to come into it and change it.’ The influence of the Academy should not be under-estimated. As the critic and writer Norman Lebrecht has noted, its creation by Marriner ‘…altered the ecology of concert life, reviving the chamber ensemble as a viable alternative to big bands, and forcing orchestras everywhere to improve string intonation…He [Marriner] took hold of a tradition, improved it beyond previous recognition and preserved it in transmissible form.’

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